Internal tire walls have mostly been plastered over in traditional
Mexican style, with clay-sand-straw adobe, but cement stucco has also been
used, particularly in potentially wet areas and wherever extra strength seemed
advisable. Note the hand-painted Mexican tiles which Kathy has set in.

Guess I've already shown enough pictures to celebrate Kathy's and Dale's
achievement, but none the less, and for two reasons, I'm going to show you yet
another. The first of these reasons is that there are still many
outstanding jobs to be tackled and I wouldn't want you to leave this page with
the false impression that Kathy and Dale can now simply sit back and rest on
hard-won laurels. This final picture, therefore, shows just one of those
outstanding jobs: an external tire-wall still needing to be tidied up and
stuccoed over. And my second reason? Well folks, I thought you
just might like to see what a structural wall built out of discarded automobile
tires looks like, in the rough, so to speak.

Incidentally, in addition to being a great little builder of earthships, Kathy
Dixon is also a great little writer of thought provoking novels, and this
picture is of the front cover of
The Good Mother,
Kathy's story of Melanie, an emotionally and physically abused child
living in rural Oklahoma. Click on this book cover for more
detail and a free first chapter preview.